SSL Host Header with wildcard certificate on IIS7 solved

by Finn Espen Gundersen on March 2nd, 2015

When adding a HTTPS site on IIS7, the Host header field is disabled. If you have one IP per site, as used to be the requirement, this is not a problem. But when you want to host multiple sites on one IP, it is a show stopper.

In my case I had a wildcard certificate, and ran into this when adding my second site. It was important not to cause any down-time on the already running site.

It turns out that IIS7 will disable the Host Header field when the name (friendly name) of the wildcard certificate is anything else than *.domain.tld. How unexpected.

The solution is to change the friendly name of the certificate. Luckily, renaming the certificate and adding a host name to any existing sites can be done without service interruption.

About

This is an incoherent and mostly uninteresting collection of posts on a variety of topics. Generally these are small guides aimed at helping others save some time, and making sure I'm not forgetting how I fixed something.

I'm a software developer and manager in the daytime and tinkerer in the evenings. I love technology and making stuff.